Introduction

Abstract

Introduction David Russell, Karin Westman, and Naomi Wood In this issue of The Lion and Unicorn, we spend time with literature set in China, India, alternative versions of the United States, Australia, and the Nordic countries of Scandinavia. Lisa Chu Shen's "Masculinities and the Construction of Boyhood in Contemporary Chinese Popular Fiction for Young Readers" examines the works of two popular male Chinese authors, Cao Wenxuan and Zhao Lihong, to illustrate the transforming treatment of male characters in Chinese children's literature. Influenced by both economic, political, and cultural changes over the past several decades, Chinese children's books (like children's literature everywhere) are grappling with gender portrayal (notably stereotyping). Prior to the arrival of Western influences, the Chinese concept of masculinity exalted the wen (that is, the mind and intellect) over the wu (physical strength and prowess). But this began to shift toward the Western model of the domineering, macho male, a culturally antithetical view. And then, with the rise of Maoism in the twentieth century, Chinese manhood underwent a "second emasculation," when the government advocated the underplaying of gender distinctions, the consequences of which were dubbed, interestingly, yinsheng yangchuai ("the rise of women and the decline of men"). As Chen notes, "In contemporary Chinese popular fiction for children, the figure of the boy is invested with competing adult desires and anxieties around the changing notions of masculinity." Focusing on the works of two of China's most celebrated children's authors, Chen illustrates the transforming treatment of male characters in Chinese children's literature. Specifically, the author argues that "examining how masculinity is constructed in contemporary Chinese fiction for young readers reveals the continuous struggle between tradition and modernity, a topic of paramount importance in studies of Chinese literature and culture." We might add that this struggle is not peculiar to China, and that societies around the world are grappling with this, genuinely transformative, social phenomenon. Of Chinese children's literature, Chen sees hope in that, [End Page v] "[e]ncouragingly, alongside hegemonic masculinity that is widely perceived to be the ideal path toward manhood, into which male children are expected to grow, there have emerged nuanced and layered depictions of boyhood." Sharon Murphy's essay "'I think I shall die soon, Boosy': Child Illness and Morality in The History of Little Henry and His Bearer" analyzes a widely disseminated story by Evangelical writer Mary Martha Sherwood, based on her experiences as an English officer's wife serving the East India Company in early nineteenth-century India. Sherwood lost two children to tropical illnesses while in India and adopted several orphaned children in addition to caring for her own. In Murphy's reading of Little Henry and His Bearer, she connects the staggering infant mortality rate among English children in India—more than twice the rate of children in England—with stated and unspoken conflicts about the role of the English in India. Murphy provides a detailed context for those conflicts to illustrate the deep contradictions in England's Christian missionary projects, which could not mitigate the great costs to mothers and children of the "British appetite for India." Sam Morris, in "'Anything be better than this': Utopian Impulses in The Hunger Games Series and Orleans," pairs the well-known dystopian trilogy by Suzanne Collins with an unsparing and timely dystopia by Sherri L. Smith, set in a future New Orleans that has been expelled from the Outer States of America because of an intransigent and deadly disease, Delta Fever. Morris examines these dystopias and how they speak to the adolescent chronotopes of possibility and hope through the lens of Ernst Bloch's Principle of Hope, which stresses the unfinished and unfinishable quality of all utopian aspiration as the "Not-Yet." In both works the adolescent protagonists push toward utopian ideals, despite failure and even retrenchment. It is the "Not-yet" of hope that propels each to move away from the concept of utopia as a place and toward a utopian frame of mind that can disrupt complacency and acquiescence. In "Forging Truth from Facts: Trauma, Historicity and Australian Children's Picture Books," Martin Kerby and Margaret Baguley remind us how children's books about traumatic...